Paintings that Vincent van Gogh admired.
In 1882, Vincent van Gogh visited an exhibition featuring a large number of French paintings from Hendrik Willem Mesdag’s collection. Van Gogh’s letters reveal that he was impressed by what he saw at the exhibition. He regarded French precursors such as Charles-François Daubigny and Théodore Rousseau as significant role models.
This small-scale focus presentation unites some of the paintings that made such an impression on Van Gogh at the time. The presentation makes it clear that Mesdag and Van Gogh had much in common in terms of their appreciation of art.
A year after seeing this painting exhibited in The Hague, Van Gogh still retained a vivid mental picture of it, recalling an image ‘with two huts in it on which the mossy roofs stand out surprisingly deep in tone against a hazy, dusty evening sky’. He was struck by the atmosphere and colourful sky and tried to replicate the effect, attempting to capture the same atmosphere in a watercolour.